Register That? The Politics of Document Provision (and Obstruction) in the Dominico-Haitian Case

• In Event: Identity Documents as a Determinant or Inclusion or Exclusion in Latin America

Abstract

A recent string of institutional policies and judicial rulings over the past decade or so in the Dominican Republic has brought renewed attention to efforts by the Dominican state to withhold documentation from generations of permanent and semi-permanent Dominicans of Haitian descent. While the motives behind efforts to obstruct the provision of documents to this community are evident, the timing and conditions under which the Dominican state is likely to obstruct the provision of documents to Haitian descendants are not as clear. Unfortunately, existing theoretical frameworks shed little light on this question. The literature on economic modernization helps to explain why developing nations lag behind in the provision of documentation, but it cannot explain why specific ethnoracial groups lag behind other ethnoracial groups within developing nations. The constructivist approach cannot explain why some states routinely violate international norms of documentation. And, although persuasive, welfare state theory of document provision does not entirely speak to cases such as the D.R., where elected officials have not equally extended social assistance to the poor across ethnoracial identity and partisanship. In this paper, I argue that the obstruction of documentation in the D.R. is tied to a wider ethnoracial electoral strategy of divide and conquer. Weary that the political inclusion of Dominico-Haitians will spawn coalition-building between Afro-descendants and Dominico-Haitians and ultimately lead to an explosion of social assistance demands, Dominican political elites obstruct the provision of official documents to preserve the current use of state funds and social assistance as patronage. They are more likely to obstruct the provision of documents when the potential registration and sociopolitical inclusion of Haitian migrants and their descendants pass a threshold that threatens the social assistance status quo.

Author

• Danilo Antonio A Contreras Martinez, University of Texas at Austin